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Reviewed by:
  • Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora
  • K. Noel Amherd
Sango in Africa and the African Diaspora ED. Joel Tishkin, Toyin Falola, and Akintunde AkinyemiBloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. ix + 365 pp. $75.00 cloth, ISBN 978-0-253-35336-8; $27.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-253-22094-3.

This volume is the third anthology of an emerging type addressing a single Yoruba orisa (divinity), following predecessors addressing Ogun, Osun, and even a forthcoming volume from Mississippi University Press on Ayan, the god of drumming. There has been a marked shift in Yoruba studies in which discourse has left the hands of outsider anthropologists, sociologists, and historians and been taken over by those who see themselves as insiders, either as participants and representatives of said culture or those making claims to a legitimating ancestry. This volume seeks to enter the tension between the poles of emic and etic.

Asserting that the Yoruba orisa of thunder and lightning, Sango, is truly international in scope and that "Yoruba people have left an undeniable and permanent imprint on many parts of the world" (1), the editors of this volume seek to address "the nature of Sango worship within Africa and from various perspectives within the African Diaspora" (2). Emphasizing the omnipresent ambivalence, syncretic, mythic, historical, and globalized polysemy of the god wherever he manifests, the editors wish also to bring attention to what is at stake, namely "the quest for authenticity and legitimacy as peoples grapple with the legacy of slavery, colonialism, changes in identity, and the spread of Islam and Christianity" (19).

The editors organize the fifteen contributions following their own introduction into four categories: "Defining Sango in West Africa," "Representations of Sango in Oral and Written Popular Cultures," "Sango in the African Diaspora," and "The Voices of Sango Devotees." The contributions demonstrate the breadth of variation and difference residing within this singular name, Sango, while elucidating the struggles and stakes faced by communities and individuals interacting and identifying with this deity. What stands out is the intricate ties and overlaps at play among their shared ironies, humor, sorrow, polemics, and triumph; there is a cacophony of devotees' voices that resound in every contribution that is not included in the section of that title. Who counts as in or out becomes as elusive yet illuminating as Sango's own lightning celts. Through discourses on divination, bata drums, oriki, shrine carvings, the Internet, Catholic saints, wives, gender, and empire, the reader traverses realms in a vertiginous movement among attempts to grasp a concept that refuses to sit still and become singularly comprehended.

The collection offers ideas and research well worth the price of the book and runs into its own thematic dilemma. How is it realistic to create a sense of sturdy singularity as does a physical book with a title that is simultaneously the name of a god who refuses this very sclerosis of identity? And by continuing the trend of books of this type, what about the orisa who do not get books, the communities overlooked by the unintended and ironic creation of an academic pantheon while speaking of multiplicity and difference? This ambivalence rises in the plaintive voice of a Beninois worshipper of the thunder god Ara, "cousin" to Sango, stating, "I know that Ara no longer dwells on the sacred hill near our town. . . . [The Ara [End Page 189] priest said that] civilization had spoiled everything. . . . Who is Ara? Where did he come from? Where is he now? No one can answer these questions" (105).

K. Noel Amherd
noelamherd@sbcglobal.net
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